drorzel | February 28, 2007Tennessee beat Florida by ten last night, handing the Gators their third loss in the last four games. Much as I dislike Florida, and enjoy seeing them lose, I wouldn't ordinarily comment on this. Hell, I wouldn't've watched this, ordinarily-- it was an SEC game, and Vitale was calling it. I subjected myself to the first eight minutes or so, though, because of Pat Summitt and Bruce Pearl.
If you're not a sports fan, the story here is that about a month ago, Tennessee men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl went to a women's game with his shirt off and his chest painted, like a student fan. Last…
drorzel | February 27, 2007Terence Tao explains quantum theory as a game of Tomb Raider:
Imagine first that Lara is about to navigate a tricky rolling boulder puzzle, when she hears a distant rumbling sound - the sound of her player saving her game to disk. From the perspective of the player, what happens next is the following: Lara navigates the boulder puzzle but fails, being killed in the process; then the player restores the game from the save point and then Lara successfully makes it through the boulder puzzle.
Now, how does the situation look from Lara's point of view? At the save point, Lara's reality diverges…
drorzel | February 27, 2007Kate's in Rochester to argue a couple of cases, and the Queen of Niskayuna is being Difficult this morning, so I don't have as much time as I'd like for this. As a result, it may come out a little more inflammatory than I intend, but then, that's half the fun of blogging. Or something.
Anyway, the minor kerfuffle over firing teachers has produced the usual spate of off-hand comments about the obvious evil of teacher's unions. For some reason, this seems to be widely accepted as fact by just about everybody-- despite evidence that unionized districts perform better. Score another victory for…
drorzel | February 27, 2007Another unexpected win for one of my teams. I think Jay Bilas put it pretty well when he said "I bet Jim Boeheim didn't expect to be playing his senior walk-ons in the final minute of a victory." A loss, maybe, but Syracuse winning 72-58 is a real surprise.
This was a good old-fashioned Big East game, as befits the one meeting this year between the teams who won eight of the first ten Big East titles. The early history of the conference was all about Syracuse vs. Georgetown (with occasional contributions from Villanova and St. John's), and Jim Boeheim vs. John Thompson. It's a new Thompson on…
drorzel | February 27, 2007
This looks like it's most likely a robin, though it was kind of big for a robin, and the color is a little weird. Maybe it's molting, or some such. Anyway, it was perched right outside the window, and Her Majesty found it absolutely fascinating. So I took a picture.
drorzel | February 26, 2007Check out the DeMille group rigid rotor photo. Truly, a remarkable display.
(One of my students stumbled across this while researching grad schools, and showed it to me today.)
drorzel | February 26, 2007Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne (not JoAnne, as I originally typed) has a very nice post about the cult of genius in physics, and its relationship to research on the problems caused by excessive praise. Doug Natelson also has some comments. There's some fascinating stuff in the articles about praise, with some likely relevance to once and future education arguments, but I need to think about it more before I comment.
My reason for posting, though, is found in the comments. Specifically, comment #10, by "mclaren", which reads in part:
Sure, I've got a degree in physics, but basically I'm…
drorzel | February 26, 2007Kate has posted a report on Boskone talk by Brother Guy Consolmagno, on hunting for meteorites in Antarctica. Guy is a Jesuit brother, and also a research astronomer for the Vatican, and a better example of the peaceful coexistence of science and religion would be hard to find.
He's also a very entertaining speaker. I forget what I was doing that kept me from seeing this talk, but I was on a panel with him later, and he's a charming fellow. If I'd known he was spending the year on sabbatical in New York, I would've tried to get him booked into our colloquium schedule...
Anyway, the talk was a…
drorzel | February 26, 2007Well, I didn't expect this... Between that and the Oscars, I'll never cut it as a telephone psychic.
I came back from the intramural game (we lost to a team of football players who had a slight strength and conditioning edge over us) with about 11 minutes left, and it looked pretty much like what I had expected. Maryland had made a decent run, but the Tar Heels seemed to be firmly in control of the game.
And then, they just... collapsed. Mike Jones had one of his patented idiot turnovers, leading to a fast break for UNC, and then Bobby Frasor chunked as open a lay-up as I've ever seen missed…
drorzel | February 26, 2007There are some comments in the earlier post about firing teachers that probably deserve responses. They don't deserve the responses they would've gotten yesterday, though, as I was grading lab reports all morning, and the snark level was high.
Having cooled off a bit, I'll try to get back to that today (day job permitting). Let me note, however, Mark Kleiman's follow-up post, after a report from a teacher in a non-union school in Georgia.
Well, OK, that's pretty snarky, too, but it does make a useful point...
drorzel | February 25, 2007A few days ago, Inside Higher Ed did an Oscar preview, and asked five academics who study film to predict the Best Picture winner. Three of the five picked The Departed to win, and one of the other two preferred it to his predicted winner (Babel).
Clearly, Scorsese is doomed to lose yet again. Scalzi's half-serious prediction of Letters from Iwo Jima is looking better and better... Or possibly The Queen, which none of the academics even mentioned.
I've seen exactly none of the nominated films, so I really don't have an opinion. If you'd like to offer a prediction, or just call me a cretin for…
drorzel | February 25, 2007Syracuse beat Providence yesterday, in a good old-fashioned Big East game-- on a critical late-game play, a Providence player got smacked across the face hard enough to turn his head, and no foul was called. He missed the shot, Syracuse got the rebound, and it was all over but the free-throw shooting.
This was a classic bubble-team game-- Syracuse was up six for much of the first half, and trailed by four at halftime. Then they were up again for a while,were tied a few times in the middle of the second half, and held on to eke out a narrow victory. The win was their 20th, which is not as much…
drorzel | February 25, 2007(Recipe from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World)
Chicken Stock: 3.5 cups
Saffron Threads: 1.0 pinch
Extra Virgin Olive Oil: 3.0 Tbs
Onion, Minced: 1.0 medium
Rice, Short/Medium Grain: 2.0 cups
Shrimp, Cut Up: 2.0 cups
Salt, Pepper: to taste
Parsley: for garnish
Pre-heat the oven to 500 F, and warm the stock with the saffron.
Heat oil in 10-12 inch overproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, and cook until translucent (4-5 minutes).
Add the rice and cook until "glossy" (whcih I take to mean "all the grains are well coated with oil"), 1-2 minutes.
Add salt, pepper, stock,…
drorzel | February 24, 2007Speaking (as we were) of the glamourour life of writers, Bookslut points to an interview with Iain Banks. If you're not familiar with Banks, he's a prolific author who alternates "mainstream" literary novels (as "Iain Banks") with genre SF novels (as "Iain M. Banks"). With a very few exceptions, his books are very smart, fairly bloody, and darkly comic.
He apparently sells very well in the UK, but hasn't really managed to crack the US market, to the point where his most recent SF novel (The Algebraist) is only available from a small press. It's a shame, because he's written some absolutely…
drorzel | February 24, 2007OVer at the Whatever, Senor BaconCat has two long posts on the glamorous life of a successful SF writer: one breaking down his income from SF writing in detail, and the other talking about why he's talking about money. The comment threads are also lively and interesting in their own right. It's particularly funny to see the number of people who are shocked at how low the income is-- $67,000 is a pretty respectable salary in the world of people who don't play around on the Internet all that often, and it's probably in the ninety-somethingth percentile for fiction writers.
Of course, I'm amused…
drorzel | February 24, 2007Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman are both talking about firing teacehrs. Being moderate, wonkish guys rather than fire-breathing ideologues, they mostly say sensible things-- Kevin notes that it's really difficult to document bad teaching, and Mark has a particularly good point about teacher pay:
[T]he brute fact is that we're not currently paying teachers enough to attract an adequate number of high-quality teachers. The only way to fix that is by raising wages for the kind of people we want to attract. Without that, making firing easier is mostly a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on a…
drorzel | February 23, 2007It's a good day for people posting about science I don't understand...
Peter Woit points to the Non-Commutative Geometry blog, at which Alain Connes, the godfather of non-commutative geometry, is posting. It's not the most polished blog, but if you can understand what they're talking about, it's probably interesting.
Scott Aaronson is excited about new results in quantum computing, where somebody has "announced a quantum algorithm for evaluating NAND trees in O(âN) time." I'm not quite sure what he's talking about either, but it has something to do with ants, sugar cubes, and teaching…
drorzel | February 23, 2007Buried in a "Quick Takes" post a few days ago, Inside Higher Ed had a link to a set of suggestions for improving public education:
Education Sector is offering the following eight education ideas for the 2008 presidential campaign. They cover the educational spectrum, from preschool to higher education. They range in scope from big ideas that would chart entirely new directions for policymaking to others that would simply help schools and colleges improve what they are already doing.
These ideas are neither Democratic nor Republican. They are pragmatic solutions to real problems that both…